Another lesson about boys I learned from little “Mickey” when I was investigating his charge that the jailer had beaten him.  The jailer said:  “Some o’ those kids broke a window in there, and when I asked Mickey who it was, he said he didn’t know.  Of course he knew.  D’yu think I’m goin’ to have kids lie to me?” A police commissioner who was present turned to Mickey.  “Mickey,” he said, “why did you lie?” Mickey faced us in his rags.  “Say,” he asked, “Do yoh t’ink a fullah ought to snitch on a kid?” And the way he asked made me ashamed of myself.  Here was a quality of loyalty that we should be fostering in him instead of trying to crush out of him.  It was the beginning in the boy of that feeling of responsibility to his fellows on which society is founded.  Thereafter,

no child brought before our court was ever urged to turn state’s evidence against his partners in crime—­much less rewarded for doing so or punished for refusing.  Each was encouraged to “snitch” on himself, and himself only.

Another interview with a boy under sentence to the industrial school emphasizes the same point: 

“I can help you, Harry,” I said.  “But you’ve got to carry yourself.  If I let boys go when they do bad things, I’ll lose my job.  The people ’ll get another judge in my place to punish boys, if I don’t do it.  I can’t let you go.”  We went over it and over it; and at last I thought I had him feeling more resigned and cheerful, and I got up to leave him.  But when I turned to the door he fell on his knees before me and, stretching out his little arms to me, his face distorted with tears, he cried:  “Judge!  Judge!  If you let me go, I’ll never get you into trouble again!”

I had him!  It was the voice of loyalty....  This time he “stuck.”  “Judge,” the mother told me long afterward, “I asked Harry the other day, how it was he was so good for you, when he wouldn’t do it for me or the policeman.  And he says:  ’Well, Maw, you see if I gets bad ag’in the Judge he’ll lose his job.  I’ve got to stay with him, ‘cause he stayed with me.’” I have used that appeal to loyalty hundreds of times since in our work with the boys, and it is almost infallibly successful.

In eight years, out of 507 cases of boys put upon their honor to take themselves from Denver to the Industrial School at Golden, to which the court had sentenced them, Judge Lindsey had but five failures.  In view of such facts, who will think for a moment that we have so much as begun to turn the latent loyalty of boyhood to its highest ethical use?